Op-Ed: People don’t want to work? Guess again, morons.


By Paul Wallis
December 29, 2024
DIGITAL JOURNAL

How will digital workspaces progress? — Image by © Tim Sandle

Years of idiotic generation-bashing have led to this particularly stupid statement: “People don’t want to work.” Great minds will no doubt come up with a dumber assessment but let’s stick to this one.

Let’s start with the obvious.

WRONG. They don’t want to work for nothing, and they want to have lives.

The constant bleating self-righteous headlines tell a long irritating story of ignorance and ineptitude. Wages are now useless. The workplace environment is often hellish and absurdly stressful. People turn over fast due to multiple good reasons.

The paranoid penny-pinching surveillance-obsessed management culture is utterly insufferable for many.

Unrealistic and absurdly costly demands like “back to the office” don’t help people struggling to pay rent, health, and power. You can pay for your long time-consuming commute or eat, apparently.

This imbecility effectively turns 8 hour days into far more expensive 12 hour days and bites deeply into wages and savings. That can never be sustainable in this massively overpriced economy.

Thanks to the cost of living, the ordinary job, particularly a low-wage job is now a form of extended torture, and it looks like it’s about to get a lot worse.

It’s not a complete mystery how this happened. The banal, simplistic certainties of jobs and careers were completely blindsided. A job now means nothing and a career is, at best, likely to be patchy.

People have been infamously working more than one job just to meet rent and living costs for well over a decade. Food banks are supporting incredible numbers of people. According to one person I spoke to from a food bank, they say more people should be using them.

Contrast this cluster of stupidities with the “one job was enough to raise a family and own a house” of 60 years ago. That was pretty much true.

You couldn’t call it flashy, but it worked. People had lives, too. The society was healthier, crime was much lower, and there were actual opportunities.

You could at least convince yourself that you had a credible future.

Not anymore.

The Millennials and Gen Z don’t and can’t believe it. They can’t own homes, and it’s a miserable, unhygienic, and hyper-neurotic living environment in so many ways.

How are they supposed to achieve anything?

They’re trying to live in an economic environment that no longer functions. Ground-level data is all bad. If you look at the global medication stats, you’ll see that things aren’t great. Some of these meds are even dietary supplements, used to manage deficiencies in basic nutrition.

Gen Alpha will be totally feral, with so many good reasons. They have nothing but economic hardship to look forward to, particularly with AI hoovering up so many jobs.

They have no reason to do anything but go into survival mode. “The system” is effectively dead. I doubt you could convince the Mills, Z or Alphas that the system ever worked because the system has basically killed their chances.

We’ll leave out the politics.

Suffice to say that the word “politics” is now a synonym for “insanity”

For progressives like me, that’s incredibly infuriating. Who told you sanctimonious morons to just babble on while civilization collapsed? You’re as bad as they are.

What’s needed is the exact opposite, The world needs a lot of competence on the job. That’s what jobs are supposed to do, and who’s supposed to be doing them, in case the topic ever comes up. Not ridiculous greedy little nobodies who screw up everything they touch and get overpaid for it.

A gang member said years ago that there was no point in working a low-wage day job when he could make thousands a day illegally. Sound familiar? I remember hearing that 50 years ago.

So let’s get back to this “Nobody wants to work” idiocy. In the absence of leadership which has taken mediocrity to new heights of ineptitude, what are you supposed to do?

The only thing you can do.

Create a life for yourself. Go indie.

Be a contractor or whatever so you can work on your own terms doing work you’re good at. Just make sure you get paid. Get useful skills like a trade or something that can’t be automated overnight. Be your own boss, if for no other reason than it’s much less annoying.

It can be quite frustrating and worrying working with “whatever” in the market.

if you know how to hustle, you can work on your terms.

Good luck.

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Disclaimer
The opinions expressed in this Op-Ed are those of the author. They do not purport to reflect the opinions or views of the Digital Journal or its members.